Christian Bale discusses his working relationship with director Scott Cooper

Christian Bale enjoys working as "the right-hand-man" for director Scott Cooper, which is why he's joining forces with the filmmaker again on Gothic mystery The Pale Blue Eye.

In the Netflix thriller, Bale plays veteran detective Augustus Landor who is summoned to a military academy in 1830 to investigate a murder, where he meets a young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).

The film marks Bale's third collaboration with Cooper, after previously starring for him in 2013 crime drama Out of the Furnace and 2017 western Hostiles.

The Pale Blue Eye is available to stream on Netflix UK from 6 January.

Video transcript

TOM BEASLEY: Christian, you mentioned working with Scott again. What is it that keeps you two working together? What keeps drawing you back?

CHRISTIAN BALE: When you work with people that you just find there's an understanding between the two of you and, obviously, as a director, if you find somebody who seems to get your vision and is achieving what you were hoping to achieve, then they seem to come back. And I'm very grateful for that, you know?

And I really enjoy working with Scott. I love his ideas. And we have a kind of a nice shorthand between the two of us at this point. And I enjoy being his right-hand man and trying to achieve his vision for whichever film it is we're making.

TOM BEASLEY: Absolutely. So when he calls you up, it's a yes straight away?

CHRISTIAN BALE: Well, he is a cheater, and I am a sloth. So he wants to work far more than I do. So sometimes, he's like, trying to really poke me, and I'll just go, ah, I just don't want to do anything. I don't want to do anything at all.

But-- but we have a lot of projects that we've discussed. And we've got at least a couple that we plan on doing in the future.